Hand sanitisers in offices etc. should be outlawed. There's simply no reason for their existence and using them probably weakens your immune system anyway. They are useful for situations like camping but that is all.
E. coli, Shigella, Giardia, Cryptosporidium and Salmonella can all very happily live in the wilderness, infect multiple species, and can be carried by other campers and their pets.
Combine that with poor refrigeration of food, generally less hand-washing overall (due to the absence of plumbing) and the potentially more serious consequences of those infections (dehydration due to a GI pathogen is a much bigger deal two days from anywhere in the Colorado Rockies than it is curled up on your couch), it's definitely a thing.
https://www.avma.org/public/Health/Pages/Outdoor-Enthusiasts...
>"To our knowledge this was the first time anyone had shown hospital bacteria becoming tolerant to alcohols," says Timothy Stinear, a coauthor of the study and a researcher at the University of Melbourne's Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.
Bacteria can plausibly develop resistance to just about anything so gratuitously adding antibacterials to the environment is pretty inherently bad - use them when and only when needed (antibiotics in meat being another problem example).
Also, it seems there's a threshold below which a lack-of-exposure to bacteria and other immune-vectors is actually bad for a person - by preventing the immune system from acting normally.
I still never got it.
Bio majors, is thete any truth to that? This article seems to say no. What phenomena could they have been referring to?
There's understanding what has been experimentally determined so-far about bacteria and organisms and there's understanding that the realm of things we haven't so-far discovered about organisms and their potential evolutions may larger than what we have discovered.
'T1 is not easy to get rid off. The best solution of all is to not use T1-sensitive strains. You’ll need to bleach the hell out of everything as well as UV irradiate if possible. And I mean everything, water baths, glassware, specs, pipets, your wife and kids (the latter is probably deserving of a good bleaching anyways). This is serious business T1 can exist in aerosol form for up to a few months, so it’s going to take regular cleaning and testing intervals. In a previous lab it took about six months to a year of solid effort to eradicate our T1 infection.'
[1]http://genrepair.scientopia.org/2011/01/11/do-we-have-a-t1-p...
That, or we could just make sure we use sanitizers that have high concentrations of alcohol in these settings.
The bacteria referred to here require lower concentrations of alcohol to survive. They're not able to survive 100% alcohol (or close to 100%), and it's very unlikely that they could evolve to tolerate alcohol levels that high. The reason we don't commonly use high concentrations of alcohol is that it's more irritating to the skin (for the same reason that it kills bacteria). But in settings where killing bacteria is necessary, dehydrating the skin is an acceptable tradeoff.
IIRC, there's something of a peak in the effectiveness curve below the close-to 100% [1] point for ethanol, having something to do with too high a concentration not actually penetrating cell membranes fast enough when there isn't enough water in solution already. It's been a while since I read up on it. The papers are out there, for the curious.
That said, I also recall the European standard of 85% (w/w?) being far better as a disinfectant, as supported by the evidence, than the US minimum of 62% w/w (or 70% v/v). Perhaps instead of a ban, merely increasing the minimum percentage to something that doesn't encourage resistance would be enough.
[1] 96.5% or thereabouts is the highest distillation concentration, above which it would be hygroscopic and come down to that if left open to air.
Mixing the two works well for liquid formulations, where the dispenser is a fine mist sprayer, but I'd be concerned that anything gelled or with additives for a foaming dispenser might not mix evenly enough.
[1] The usual alcohol in "rubbing alcohol" and, of course, for the previously-mentioned reason, ethanol is excluded if it's 99%
Sanitizer should ONLY be legal for use in hospitals
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/say-goodbye-antibacte...
A better solution would probably be to mandate 70% alcohol concentration in all sanitize containers.